The imports of vegetables, especially low-priced Chinese ones, are dramatically increasing. The major commodities imported from China, such as red pepper, garlic, onion, and carrot, directly affect the price, demand, and supply of the domestic market. For this reason, the Agricultural Outlook & Information Center has a monitoring system which hires someone to report situation changes of Chinese vegetables in their production, processing and export. The monitoring report is used in preparing Vegetable Outlook Monthly Report.
However, the monitoring report has the limitation of not providing detailed statistical data. It just describes the short-term forecasts on Chinese vegetable export to Korea whether it increases or decreases in the next month. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to estimate monthly import demand functions on major vegetables and to provide more informative outlook reports using the estimated results.
In estimating the functions, there are some limitations. First, the sample period is not enough to estimate an import demand function because the share of imports in total demands became recently significant. Second, the explanatory variables used in the estimation of import demand functions are restrictive due to unavailability of data. Further study is necessary to make the functions solid as the data is accumulated.

Researchers: Ki-Hwan Park, Young-Gu Park, Jea-Han Kim, Jong-Yeal Yeun
Research period: 2007. 9. - 2007. 12.
E-mail address: kihwan@krei.re.kr